A poignant memoir by one of our nation’s most admired African-American women, written with the assistance of journalist Blau. Widow of assassinated civil rights leader Medgar Evers who has herself served as chairwoman of the NAACP, Evers-Williams chronicles her own evolution and turning points, while offering practical advice to readers. Though her tone is occasionally preachy and her prose is a bit uninspired, she offers a glimpse into not only one woman’s struggles, but, indirectly, into those of a nation. When she first married Evers, she not only resented the time he spent away from her but didn—t even share his “zeal for the cause.” For, raised by her paternal grandparents in a professional, middle-class setting, Evers-Williams had been largely sheltered from the poverty and discrimination that devastated the lives of many African-Americans. As the wife of an activist, however, she soon enough was exposed to the blatant racism that poisoned much of the South. At the height of Medgar Evers’s efforts, ominous phone calls and other harassments pervaded their family life. Following the murder of her husband, Evers-Williams fought the good fight as a single mother; her determination to raise her three children in a more humane environment led her not only to civil rights but to human rights in a broader context. Among her many personal triumphs was her success in seeing her husband’s assassin finally convicted decades after the murder. In her 60’s, while nursing her second husband in his final stages of prostate cancer, Evers-Williams rose to the number-one position in the NAACP, helping to save it from numerous financial and political disasters that plagued the organization. Crediting much of her success in overcoming adversity to her deep faith in God, she refers to herself as “still-growing, . . . a work in progress.” Driven by passion, this book instructs and inspires.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-316-25520-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1998
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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